Ernst: Put six lanes and roundabouts on U.S. 41 Bypass

The MPO is set to vote on the future of the road that has needed work for years.

Eric Ernst

Six lanes, roundabouts at every major intersection. That's my preference for the U.S. 41 Bypass in Venice.

Here's my reasoning. The roundabout at Jacaranda Boulevard and East Venice Avenue has worked well, so let's try it elsewhere, combined with the notion that when I head to Sarasota from my home in Englewood, having an extra lane on the bypass would provide more opportunities to pass dawdlers.

Selfish? Maybe. The suggestion admittedly is not based on sound logic or established traffic engineering principles. And what works in my circumstances may not in someone else's.

Hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of drivers traverse this road each year, originating from all directions, heading to diverse destinations, at different times, with varying needs as well as driving habits.

The job of trying to satisfy all of them falls to members of the Sarasota/Manatee Metropolitan Planning Organization. At 9:30 a.m. Monday in New College Sudakoff Center, they'll discuss how to spend as much as $72 million to improve the bypass.

The prevailing winds seem to favor the traditional answer to congestion: buying right-of-way, adding lanes and keeping the traffic lights. However, the MPO has hesitated to commit, with its members probably nagged by the fear that the considerable expense will not ultimately help traffic flow and that it will have other unintended consequences.

Conflicting interests surround the issue of whether the road should simply move cars and trucks as quickly as possible through Venice or whether economic and social factors should carry a weight equal to that of traffic flow.

Mike Gelormino, who used to run an auto parts store on the bypass, has collected 34 signatures from bypass business owners opposed to widening the road. They worry about the disruption during construction and about their access once it's finished. Some depend on walk-in customers; others have delivery trucks that come and go all day.

Indicative of the conflicting interests, some enterprises will profit from a widening. About 68 percent of the $72 million cost of six-laning with traffic lights would go toward right-of-way acquisition and into the pockets of land owners and eminent domain attorneys. And, the Venice Area Chamber of Commerce has come out in favor of widening with traffic lights.

The social ramifications may be a bit more ephemeral, but six lanes or more of asphalt will assuredly represent a physical and psychological barrier between the west and east sides of Venice. The Intracoastal Waterway has already created an island; an expanded bypass would fortify it.

How that would affect Venetian social, political and commercial life has probably never been studied. It's funny, though, that the Venice City Council seems to like the image of the bypass as a thoroughfare, moving traffic through Venice, which caters more to drivers from Sarasota, Englewood and North Port.

The MPO debate has seemed to distill to an either/or choice between six lanes with traffic lights and four lanes with roundabouts.

Some hybrids also have promise. Rod Warner of Sarasota, who sits on the MPO citizen advisory group, and who has adopted roundabouts as a cause celebre, suggests keeping the bypass at four lanes while beefing up the intersections.

That makes sense. Intersections, not road width, dictate capacity. In a letter Wednesday to MPO members, Warner quotes an unnamed traffic engineer who says, "Empirical-based capacity analysis procedures show that a flared entry roundabout, for example from two lanes flared to three, can provide 95 percent of the capacity of a full three-lane approach to three-lane entry."

In plain English, a four-lane bypass with three-lane roundabouts could handle as many cars as a six-lane roadway with three-lane roundabouts, and probably for less money and disruption.

There's no definitive right or wrong answer, but the six lane/traffic light plan still leaves Center Road and Venice Avenue as failed intersections, which suggests a better way must be out there somewhere.